1) Any time you see an e-mail that says "forward this on to '10' (or however many) of your friends," "sign this petition," or "you'll get bad luck," or "you'll get good luck," or "you'll see something funny on your screen after you send it," or whatever--it almost always has an e-mail tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and e-mails of those folks you forward to. The host sender is getting a copy each time it gets forwarded and then is able to get lists of "active" e-mail addresses to use in spam e-mails or sell to other spammers. Even when you get e-mails that demand you send the e-mail on if you're not ashamed of God/Jesus--that is email tracking, and they are playing on our conscience. These people don't care how they get your e-mail addresses--just as long as they get them. Also, e-mails that talk about a missing child or a child with an incurable disease, "how would you feel if that was your child"--e-mail tracking. Ignore them and don't participate!

2) Almost all e-mails that ask you to add your name and forward on to others are similar to that mass letter years ago that asked people to send business cards to the little kid in Florida who wanted to break the Guinness Book of Records for the most cards. All it was, and all any of this type of e-mail is, is a way to get names and "cookie" tracking information for telemarketers and spammers--to validate active e-mail accounts for their own profitable purposes.

You can do your friends and family members a great favor by sending this information to them. You will be providing a service to your friends. And you will be rewarded by not getting thousands of spam e-mails in the future!

Do yourself a favor and stop adding your name(s) to those types of listing regardless how inviting they might sound! Or make you feel guilty if you don't! It's all about getting e-mail addresses and nothing more.

You may think you are supporting a great cause, but you are not! Instead, you will be getting tons of junk mail later and very possibly a virus attached! Plus, we are helping the spammers get rich! Let's not make it easy for them!

Also: E-mail petitions are not acceptable to Congress of any other organization--i.e. social security, etc. To be acceptable, petitions must have a "signed signature" and full address of the person signing the petition, so this is a waste of time and you are just helping the e-mail trackers."

--Submitted by: Jaye B.

Here are some member answers to get you started, butplease read all the advice and suggestions that ourmembers have contributed to this question.

All these "chain" emails do is use up bandwidth. Also, (if someone hacks your email account), in the hands of a spammer, a letter of this type is a gold mine of email addresses especially if ALL of the addresses of everyone in the chain are still present in the forwarded email.

Another variation is the fake/scam "this is a virus warning" email that we see so often.

Paul you are dead right. I am 78 years old so go back a long way. This pyramid scam has been prevalent all my life, the only difference is that it is now electronic and much easier to set up. 99% of all such emails are either fraudulent or phishing, the 1% is from some niaive **** who wants to get his(her) name out in public. (Peter) Derek

If you receive one of these emails, the best (and only) way to respond is to mark it as spam or junk. This lets your email server or isp know that it is a negative email, and leaves a record of a potential pfishing scheme (sorry if my spelling or terminology is wrong, but I am not claiming to be a i.t. expert). By doing what the email asks, there is a high probability that you will not be helping the little girl in Idaho with inoperatable cancer, but you will most certainly be helping to add to someones mailing list. You certainly will not be doing any of your friends or family members on your mailing list any favours. Do you remember the chain letters we use to get as kids? Did you reply to them? Did you get rich? Did anyone you sent them to get rich because of them that you know of?

You might also consider making a reply to the person who sent you the chain letter - if they are people you know, and letting them know the forward is false and potentially harmful to spread around. Sites like truthorfiction.com and hoax-slayer.com etc. have articles debunking much of this viral nonsense, and pointing the senders to those sites may help as well.

This kind of letter usually arrives from a well meaning friend that you would like to continue receiving email from. If you let your email server or isp know that this is spam, you risk putting that person on a spam list (at least for your account) and his/her mail may be divirted to the "spam bucket." Just delete it and let the mailer know what is really going on.

What if I were to copy and paste the content into a blank email and then send the original to the spam folder. Wouldn't that keep it from tracking my friends and verifying my own email for them? Of course I would tell the person to ignore the forward request and do as I did. I would probably copy and paste the content without including the part telling you to forward it to 10 people.

I asked a question and a thumb down does not help me know why. Can you respond and tell me why the thumb down and answer my questions. I learn from things like this. I am here to help if I can and to learn something new so I can help better. School doesn't teach you everything. They never even discussed working on a laptop.

First of all I am new to this and it is not necessary to be nasty. Second this appears to be a forum not a poll and my question had to do with the topic of the forum so it is not necessary to start a new discussion about the same topic. If I made a mistake, I apologize for the misunderstanding. I did not realize this forum discussion was a poll. You could have told me that without the attitude and remarks. Have a great day.

Those who have been victims of Email scams or have sufferedmonetary damages will find relief by emailing the offendingemail, or phoning: The Attorney General of their state, TheBanking Commissioner of their state, the Fair Trade Commission,or the Consumer Advocate person of their city or state.

A serial virus might stop these folks for awhile. These chain E-mails can be managed by changing the settings for what you will recieve, and from whom. I have a happy chain-link in my group and I blocked her Fw;, Fw; It worked perfectly! Nothing for three weeks now. I won't attempt to say what keystrokes it took (unless you have hours to waste) so maybe someone can outline it?

The old saying "If it sounds too good to be true it probably is" always stands up.Offers of cash for a reply email will ALWAYS be a suck in. Requests for charity can be met by going directly to the charities site & not by email. Chain emails of any type should never be forwarded.There is always a better way to research an offer than by answering/forwarding an email. Stop all spam at your IN BOX.

While it is technically *possible* that there's some sort of tracking going on, in the vast majority of cases there isn't.

Today's anti-virus programs watch for stuff like this. Because, if an email fires up a program that can track where an email has gone and report back to a marketer, then some other email could launch a program that installs itself on your computer to do all kinds of nasty things. Like, pop-up ads, keyboard watchers, or using your computer to send out spam, etc. So, if your anti-virus is up-to-date then you're pretty safe against this sort of tracking.

As for cookies or beacon images, those won't harm your computer. But they can be used for marketing statistics. Again, while it's technically feasible that reading an email with a web bug in it could be tied to the particular email address of the first person to get the email, that's not how they're usually used. And, anyone that person forwards it to will not have their email address tracked nor harvested by this method.

Mostly, the pleas to forward to other people are just someone wanting to spread their ideas as far as possible. Or, someone just playing a prank and trying to get people to forward nonsense all over the world.

99% of the "Please forward this to everyone" emails I get contain at least some misinformation, and often the entire email is completely flawed or a hoax. Even the ones that are trying to warn you of some great peril are usually worthless or outright dangerous, like HIV infected needles in coin return slots, gang member initiation rituals, kidnap attempts in parking lots, or simple procedures that will save someone in an emergency medical situation.

The website Snopes is not perfect, but the vast majority of forwarded emails are addressed on there. Use the search box to look for unique information in the email (names, places, etc.) and you'll find the email you just received. Most will turn out to be false.

Several years ago, when I would receive one of these emails from a friend or family member I would look it up on Snopes and then reply back to the person with the link to the Snopes article. It didn't take long before I stopped receiving these from most people. Either they started looking it up themselves (I hope.) Or, they just stopped including me in their forward lists.

There is one significant problem with *other* people forwarding these things. When someone sends one of these messages to you and 20 other people, your email address is now on the machines of 20 people. If 5 of them forward to 20 more people then your email address is now on about 100 different computers. (Because, by default, most email programs include the entire list of people the original was sent to when it creates the forwarded copy.) Repeat that a few times and pretty soon, without you doing anything, your email address is on thousands of computers.

Eventually, your email address will get forwarded to someone whose computer is infected with a virus. That virus scours the hard disk of the machine its on looking for email addresses to send spam to. That is where a lot of spam comes from.

That's also why you cannot trust the return address of emails sent to you. A lot of spam programs pull random addresses from nearby each other in a file. One will be put in the To: field and the other in the From: field. The idea being that if the addresses are close to each other in a forwarded email then maybe those two people know each other. That makes it more likely that someone will trustingly open an attachment in an email they think came from a techie friend.

Always heed the advice: Never open an email attachment that you were not expecting. If an email comes through with an attachment, always check with the sender before opening, even if it's someone you trust. You cannot be certain it came from their computer unless they verify that it did.

Glad to see someone else uses a web site like this to check spam and other false (and old) emails that are being sent around. Some things were started in the 1990's and are still picked up by people to send around again; I figure a lot of people are new to the computer age and either don't check or just take everything sent out as brand new. Some of the emails concerning chemicals can result in explosions if used in the manner in which they are suggested.

As someone who is in a fight for change I found your post both helpful and encouraging. The original Q & A is of general concern, no doubt, but it's so good to have these offerings of experience to target our specific needs when navigating on-line!

I do exactly the same: "...I would look it up on Snopes and then reply back to the person with the link to the Snopes article. It didn't take long before I stopped receiving these from most people. "

And I make sure to reply to every address, not just in the From, but in the body. And I even politely ask my friend/relative to continue sending me their "urgent news" so I can continue to be of help. I have not received one for several years now.

... I still can't get certain family members to STOP sending me this crap. Even after in-person discussions about it. I hit "reply to all" and I also often copy many of the people in the fwd'd headers in the email body. Still can't get it through their thick skulls. <div>I HATE THESE!

On the first point:You just CAN'T win anything by forwarding a chain e-mail.

It's extremely unlikely that there is any tracking stuff imbeded in those. Usualy, any images are the doing of some persons who propagated the message, usualy added as part of a "cute" signature. This can make a 2 lines message inflate to over 2 Mb! I've received one such.

They do some damage by waisting bandwidth and cloging ISP's mail servers.

The problem is that, if any of the recipient computer is infected by a virus or spyware, then ALL the addresses are like juicy fruits ready to be picked. As there is a very high probability that all of those are valid and in current use. It's like the fabled "Pot of Gold" for scammers and spammers.Also, the names and e-mail addresses of the forwarders are prime targets: It shows that those peoples are more credulous than average and more prone to buy crap advertised in SPAM or follow random links those may contain.

It's entirely possible that some spammers do initiate such a chain in the hope that they could get it back or it reatch some infected computer that will report all those addresses. They don't need to add any tracker.

Forwarding e-mails just can't bring you luck (nor badluck if you don't forward), but it CAN make you loose your acount as most webmails and ISP do have terms that forbid you from participating in the propagation of chain e-mails. It's usualy just after the mention that you are forbided from transmiting virus or other malware and defamatory content.

Electronic petitions ARE used and can have an impact, even if the local juridiction don't "officialy" say so, and even if they say it's not acceptable. In any serious electronic petition, you need to enter your name and street address. That with your e-mail address is often deemed "sufficient credentials".Normaly, a serious electronic petition don't rely on chain e-mails. You are rather asked to navigate to a specific site where you "sign" the petition. Also, an e-mail about that petition requires you to copy the needed address in your browser as the site's address is not provided as an active link but only as plain text.

Here, in Canada, such petitions have succeeded in forcing some gouvernmental agency to come back on already passed decisions and reverse them.

I am always annoyed by forwards and chain letters for all the reasons listed above. But to actually expect to get money for forwarding on some sappy spsm is beyond annoying. Just how is this $1000 suppsed to materialize? If no one is ante-ing up, and everyone who hits send gets $1000 then someone with some awful deep pockets wants to make sure the worlds population is circulating sloppy sentimental greetings or out of date, out of likelihood, peril that needs no such dire message.

The answer to your question is simpler than some of the answers you've received.

Ask yourself, what could a company possibly gain by offering what is purported to be offered in the e-mail. Then ask yourself if there isn't a much easier and less expensive way for them to get the information you are requested to give.

In this case, people willingly and freely give their e-mail addresses to online sites, so why would a company need to pay such an exhorbitant sum? If a company is trying to market their product, they can do a lot more at $10 per recipient through more traditional channels (like web ads, search engine listings, e-mails, Facebook, etc.).

Any time a company ever offers a "reward" for referring a friend, it's through their own web site. For example, you get extra entries in a contest if you submit their e-mail addresses in an online form.

In short: common sense will tell you when something is legitimate. If you're not sure, assume it's not. If you really want to know, check reputable sites like snopes.com, which help people know when the chain e-mail they've received is fact, fiction or some mixture.

Hi Jaye, do not send on, mail you did not ask for in the first place.There are so many of them. One could be spending a day, to resend un asked for mail.Chances are, people you would send it to, have received is as well. Cheers,FranciscusNZ

Personally any of these spam e-mails I get I don't bother passing them on anyway regardless of whether or not they can be used to gain e-mail addresses.

The first one about mining the e-mail addresses from the forwarded message, this could be done, but you will find that most of the time after so many forwards people will have a tendency to delete the forwarded parts to clean up the e-mail, and also to hide their own e-mail address, and friends e-mail addresses, so whilst this would work the person mining the data would probably end up with only a few e-mail addresses and it would be more hassle than it's worth.

As for the ones that ask you to add your name and forward it on, if your just adding your name and no e-mail address and removing the e-mail addresses from the top of the forward, again there is very little they can get from this. Although most of these e-mails never make it back to the original sender anyway so they're just a waste of time.

Best idea of the lot is to just click the button marked Delete - nb. very important if the e-mail has been forwarded from one of your friends don't click the Spam button as this will add your friends e-mail address to the spam list, and other genuine e-mails they send you could also get treated as spam, in addition to this your friends e-mail could get added to the companies black list, which result in most of their e-mails also being treated as spam to other people they are e-mailing as well, so it might not just affect you but other people as well. I had this done once to me, and ended up being unable to unsubscribe from a mailing list 'cos the mailing list thought my unsubscribe was spam, in the end I had to go through the hassle of changing my e-mail address and telling all my friends my new e-mail, and nearly sued the person for the damages she caused, although as she wasn't very IT literate I let her off.

The only true benefit of participating in an EMail Chain Letter is the increase of email spam dramatically, perhaps exponentially. Unless you absolutelylove spending time plowing through email, you would be well advised to respondonly to offers from vendors and senders who are known to you. It if sounds toogood to be true, more than likely, it is too good to be true.

Great answers in the replies already. I am not sure why people keep forwarding these things. I have a canned email I send out at least once a year to all my contacts that tells about these emails. Despite my efforts I still have friends and family that send me these on occasion. If they say "send back to me and your friends and you will have luck or whatever" I hit 'reply', send it back to them and delete the darn thing. Petitions and all the rest end up in my trash bin. If you will notice all of these emails try to appeal to you at the emotional level which will often trigger a response from some. Resist the urge and delete.

Something has always bugged me about those emails. I was always suspicious of them and refused from day 1 to participate in any way., The most I've done is reply to my friend that I have a strict policy against participating in any chain email. Now I'll forward (and copy/paste all data into CC then back into body to strip out any code) a link to your post.

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